ECU EEC Anniversary; Piedfort

The 1992 ECU issues across member states marked the 35th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, signed in that city in 1957 — making Italy's participation in this series particularly pointed. Piedfort format, struck at twice standard planchet thickness, had been revived in the modern era largely by France's Monnaie de Paris before spreading to other European mints as a prestige collector format in the 1980s.

The timing was deliberate: 1992 was the year the Maastricht Treaty formally established the European Union and set the timetable for a single currency, rendering the ECU's days as a basket unit numbered.